Virtual socket architecture for Internet access using Mobitex

Mobitex, first emerged from Ericsson, is a cost effective and efficient packet-switched network. Its worldwide deployment and pure data network nature makes it a suitable infrastructure for wireless Internet access. Since the Internet is predominated by Internet communication protocol stack (e.g. TCP/IP, UDP/IP), these protocols should be used extensively in wireless environment to achieve wireless Internet access. Unfortunately, most of the wireless terminals in the real world, especially resource-constrained wireless terminals are unable to comprehend any existent Internet communication protocol. Due to the lack of the universal APIs and protocol standards, the challenge is how to integrate these wireless terminals into global Internet. A virtual socket architecture (VSA), which is a client gate-way-server oriented approach for wireless Internet access in wireless WAN (Mobitex) environment, is proposed. This approach uses gateway to separate the management of the behaviorally different wired and wireless worlds and to provide the wireless terminal with an access point to the Internet. It also allows the use of a lightweight protocol stack with a set of virtual socket interface on the wireless terminal, and keeps the entire Internet communication infrastructure within gateway. A specially designed protocol is applied for the wireless link to manage the bi-directional transmission of the socket operation requests and results. Based on this idea, this approach could eventually achieve the goals of making resource-constrained wireless terminals access Internet and seamless integration wireless terminals into Internet without changing the existent Internet communication protocol stack implementations and applications in the wired networks.